Zak's Weekly Musings (August 30, 2023)

In the spring of 1986, a protest unfolded outside the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual meeting. A faction of math teachers, led by John Saxon, a math book publisher, took to the streets to decry the use of calculators in elementary classrooms.

John and his merry band of Luddites brandished signs warning of the potential harm of "premature calculator usage." They believed that introducing calculators too early would strip students of the motivation to learn essential computational skills.

These concerns were shared by many teachers at the time, including one teacher, who observed that her high school students were becoming overly reliant on these devices, and another who suggested that the recently published “A Nation at Risk” report could be directly tied to the introduction of calculators in math classrooms across the country.

Naturally, this uproar was not just limited to educators. Parents/guardians around the country similarly feared their children would become overly dependent on these devices and never fully grasp the basics of arithmetic.

Instead of addressing genuine systemic issues like inequality, poverty, underfunded schools, and overcrowded classrooms, the onus of blame for students' relative underperformance in math, was disproportionately being laid at the feet of calculators. The very device many of us would playfully use to spell out "Hello" had suddenly become the scapegoat for our nationwide shortcomings in math.

All of this, of course, says nothing about the fact that the nations overtaking us on international standardized exams like Singapore, Japan, and Sweden were providing free calculators to their students. *eye roll*

Fast-forward to today, and it may seem almost laughable to think of a time when the use of calculators in classrooms could incite such fervor. And yet, in education, we find ourselves at a similar juncture now, with the emergence of advanced technological tools like ChatGPT. 

As I shared at Back-to-School Night, predictions suggest that our students are going to change careers 12 times in their working lives, and 10 of these 12 careers haven’t even been conceptualized yet.

Instead of pushing back against new technologies, what are you doing in your classroom to introduce, embrace, and integrate technologies that will actually prepare students for this brave and largely unknown world that lies ahead for them?